When you deploy a piece of software it's easy to get something wrong. The server may not be set up to specification, or you may have a typo in your configuration. For simple applications these errors are easy to identify and standard test procedures should weed out the most obvious culprits. However more complex functionality is harder to test, and errors may be harder to identify. First I'll talk about a typical error, then I'll discuss a solution.

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After 10 years of building custom websites for various clients and seeing the demand  for more complex e-communication tools growing constantly, we saw the need to develop THE ONE system for all needs which enables us to build cost effective state of the art websites including everything for your daily e-business and e-communication needs.

“ MMS-figaro integrates the most popular web platforms into your website.”

The MMS-figaro web kit is a blog based system which allows the creation of a highly dynamic custom designed website with as many subpages as you need.

"Figaro" includes a blog, twitter feed, is linking to location based information, google maps, calendars, adress books and contains all common media links for a minimum price.

Easy Administration:

The easy to use administration area (as simple as wordPress but more powerful) allows you to administrate every single section of your website.

Texteditor

Page navigation for adding and administrating pages.

Designs:

The MMS-figaro kit can be skinned according to existing corporate design guidelines.

These examples show the variety of designs within the figaro kit.

The figaro basic package costs include the implementation of your corporate design. Alternatively we can develop a new design for online and offline with our partner company less rain.

Future Developments

Profit from all Future developments and improvements by choosing "figaro"!

By choosing "figaro" as your e-communication solution you will be subscribing to a dynamic web-system which is constantly improved.

Our company will be keeping to develop new components and modules for the figaro system in the future. The next modules will be a shop system and i-phone / android-phone adaptions.

Flightlab is the online equivalent to the Red Bull Flugtag; a global event taking place in 23 different countries around the world where people build homemade, man-powered flying machines and pilot them off a 30-foot high ramp.

The online platform includes a fun-to-use workshop where people can build and paint their own flying machines. Physical qualities - material, size and shape - all influence the flight behaviour, giving each plane unique characteristics.

Pilots can store their planes on their personal homepage, a hangar, and continue working on them later on.

The goal of the game is to cover as much distance as possible. To achieve this, users may experiment with acrobatic maneuvers, collect cans of Red Bull to refuel and employ the thermal updrafts.

Points are given after each flight for distance covered and piloting style. Loops, drifts, rolls, low-level flight and other maneuvers are rewarded. In addition, the other users rate the plane's design. A total score is calculated which, if it's good enough, may be included on a high score table.

Awards

The project has won numerous international awards, 2 Webby Awards, Gold at the BIMA awards, 2 x Gold at the Davey Awards, Silver at the W3 Awards, Bronze at The One Show Interactive and the Cannes Cyber Lions, a FAB and a FABulous Award, Gold at the Clios, Winner/3D and Best In Show at Flash in the Can, and it won FWA Site of the Day and Site of the Month, amongst others.

The hugely successful game nearly doubled the traffic on Red Bull's corporate website. Flight Lab's spiritual successor, the Red Bull Soapbox Racer was launched one year later, and an update of Flight Lab is in the works.
 

Redbull SoapBox Racer

Red Bull Soapbox - kids of all ages in self-made cars, racing down a steep hill. An extremely popular event, held throughout the year across the globe. The cars are powered by gravity only, no engines allowed but all dreams and colors.

And now it’s online! All of it, the cars, the race, the place to meet and challenge your friends. We call it Red Bull Soapbox Racer and racing you will.

Race first, think later

One single click on “Race now” and you find yourself on top of a steep road, pointing downhill. While the countdown is running, please be reminded that the game is based on a realistic physics simulation and you should not not not smash into one of those nice obstacles. Do collect cans for an extra speed boost and don’t forget the spanners.With ultra speed comes maybe damage.

A Selection of Tracks

If you didn’t win instantly the first time, maybe it was the wrong track. We have tracks for everybody, Wildwest, Night Ride, Turkish Riviera, Waterland, Alpenglück - many more will be added. Or was there a problem with the car?

Another car, another race

Red Bull Soapbox Racer lets you build your own car in 3D. Just draw the outline with your mouse. It’s really that simple and everything you draw will have an effect later in the game. The rounder the wheels the better, reconsider materials, use more stickers, paint, use colors, use more colors than your opponents, use every tool you have at least once. And winning races will get you even more of those. (THERE IS A NAILGUN!)

SoapBox Builder

Give it some love, cars will be rated by who-knows-what so make sure there is no doubt. You may also browse through all existing cars for some inspiration.

The Challenge

After tinkering and test driving for a while there comes a point in time where you are quite sure to have the best car ever built on this planet. Challenge your friends! Invite them by E-Mail or simply click on the name of your long-time-rival in the so-called friends list.

A challenge works like this: Start the challenge and you have three attempts to race your best time. After that your opponent will be notified and offered three rounds to beat your time.

And after that, there is the high score list for everyone to see.

Steeper, faster, harder

It’s even better to challenge somebody on your own surprise track.Give it a try, it’s simpler than building cars. Draw with your mouse where the street should go, done. Then, if you like, adjust the downward slope with some gusto and remember the guideline: The steeper the faster. Place obstacles and power-ups as you see fit, some recommend at least one can of Red Bull.

Track Editor

Red Bull Soapbox Racer is the latest addition to our creative online communities. Make yourrace times heard, we sure will try to beat you. See you on the circuit!

The built in Image Editor with CKEditor is really great and the documentation sure did a great job of explaining how to switch on 'upload' feature. In a matter of minutes I was successfully uploading images onto our server, and seeing the results sent from the server.

However I had no way of knowing what response it expected from the server. Simply returning the image url, or an image tag didn't work. After hours googling, reading forum posts, and finally the source code form a couple of open source projects I finally got the thing working.

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I'm really excited to be typing the first post on our wysiwyg editor - CKEditor, the next generation of the popular FCKEditor. This is the third rich text editor we've tried and I have to say I'm really impressed.

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Why have we chosen to call our new Blog Product Figaro? When discussing what the Figaro is and how it should work I had one of those high-low cultural inspiration moments. 

I kept thinking of a line from Peter Shaffer's Amadeus film of 1984. there was a scene where the young mozart is trying to justify to Emperor Joseph that he is writing an opera out of Beaumarchais' Play 'the Marrriage of figaro'

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We've chosen Slimbox to provide a javascript lightbox effect. it's clean simple and very lightweight. It provides not only features for viewing an enlarged version, but has a slideshow feature which works nicely.

It's based on our favourite javascript Library MooTools and at about 4kb it's very lightweight, with a code-design that makes it very simple to implement. There are a great many Lightbox clones out there, but I found this very simple to use, and they've made the effort to upgrade to Mootools 1.2, so I had no extra compatabilty headaches.

More details can be found on the SlimBox website

Torsten has built a sharp new looking video player.

The inevitable cheesipuffs movie

It can easily be embedded into blog post. you simply have to upload one of the supported formats, in same way as picture. We show many videos post with no problem

The Blog Administration recognises it video, and builds that render player when visitors look at blog. 

Currently formats are:

• Quicktime (mov)
• Flash (flv, f4v,m4v)
• Mpeg4 (mp4)

ECO2 is a concept for a desktop software, that automatically measures your computing habits, e.g. how many servers you connect to, which online worlds you explore, or how many print-outs you make. It then calculates your electronic CO2 footprint.

Your footprint is visualised directly on your desktop as a slowly greying and finally decaying landscape. Linked to a donation system, you can offset your electronic CO2 footprint and turn your desktop back into a bright, clean environment, while simultaneously trees in the real world are planted.

Desktop Widget / Air Application

CO2-calculator

The desktop application can be minimised to widget form; or extended into a full CO2-calculator to offset all your household's CO2-emissions.

ECO2 was developed as a self-initiated project. It won first place at the "IID Green Day", a competition in Tokyo around "green ideas". Our presentation was based on the idea that virtual avatars produce very real CO2-emissions, too.